Reflection – the roller coaster of growth

I thought I would be writing about awareness and presence this week. Over the course of these two years, of putting a bead in a jar every day, I have grown to become more aware than I was when I started. I tend to listen more closely to my intuition, try to read symbols and signals, and I try to learn the lessons that come my way. I thought I had grown into a person who was present in the moment.

I postponed the writing of this blog post. I thought I would do it on Saturday, pushed it to the evening, and then I thought I’ll do it in the morning. Then – SPLASH!

I dropped my Iphone in the toilet. I had it in my back pocket of my trousers, and it slipped out. Within seconds I fetched it up, dried it off with a towel, turned it off, put in a bag of rice, took out the sim card. Googled it, saw something about using a hair dryer, so I did that too. Prayed. Was angry. Irritated.

Cut to this morning, and I told my boyfriend how irritated I was about dropping the phone in the toilet. Then he said, “You should have listened to us, never have the Iphone in the back pocket of your trousers…” I said, “What? You never told me not to have my Iphone…” He says, “Remember last weekend, we were in the city, we talked about it.” The memories are coming back, and yes he did mention it. My respons was, “there goes this weeks blog post”. As we continued the conversation I realized I thought about it yesterday. I was in an over packed mall, and I thought it might be a bad idea to have the phone in my back pocket… There they were, all the signs, and I had missed them. How present was I?

This tend to be the thing, if you don’t listen and get the lessons right away, the signals and the lessons will be harder and more painful to learn. Or so Guru Singh says. Yep Guru Singh, I got it! Or have I? Have you? Because this was not a lesson in not having your phone in your back pocket of your trousers. No! Not at all… Learning the lessons is all about getting to the bottom (of the toilet) with them. Figuring out what the symbol stands for. This was in fact a lesson of awareness and presence. The last week I have been a bit stressed. It was the first week back at work after my vacation, and my head have been busy in work whether I was working or not. So my phone called (ha!) for my attention to get back to the present moment (which was one of the big reasons for doing The Bead Movement in the first place).

One of the big lessons these past two years have given me is that growth is not a straight graph on a chart creeping up and up. It’s more like a roller coaster ride. You learn something, try to apply it, think you got it, relax a bit, and bam! You are back where you started (or at least you think that). You get back to work, try to be better, learn some more, apply it, bam! Fail again, get up on the horse. Repeat. But what we tend to miss when we do this trial-and-error-thing is that we actually grow. Slowly we are getting upwards, but the sliding downwards can make us forget that, at least make the sight a bit dim. If we commit to spiritual and personal growth, we will grow, no matter how much we fall. It’s the rising up, and trying to understand the lesson that counts.

Ps. Pray for my Iphone. It will be living in a bag of rice for 35 more hours. If you have any Iphone survival tips, please send them this way. Ds.